dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
These are the oft quoted lines of Howl, a poem by one of America's most controversial poets: Allen Ginsberg. He was a member of the Beat generation, an eclectic counter-cultural movement that consisted of poets, novelists, artists, philosophers, visionaries, drug fiends, and mad holy saints this side of paradise. In a post-World War America, people wanted to get back to a sense of normalcy under the uncertain threat of the Soviet empire. They got back to business with industrious gumption and developed a clean, safe, conservative, predictable, and very Christian America. Unfortunately, this America, in which father knew best, often ignored other aspects of the human experience: the plight of black people, the status of women in society, drug use, conformity, censorship, and so forth. Enter the Beat generation, or beatniks, as in beat of the jazz rhythm merged with novel forms of thinking- like sputnik, the soviet satellite, space tech- the movement was an embrace of new forms of expression, driven by the beat of that which is alien (like 'negro' music and peyote reveries), forbidden (drugs, communism, anarchy), and futuristic (satellite, electronics)- beat-nik.
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between
The beatniks followed their genetic mission to rebel against dominant social structures and push society to new stages of cultural-neurologic evolution. Perhaps the most famous member of that movement was Jack Kerouac, an influential writer who wrote the most magnificent travel book ever written- On the Road. What Jack Kerouac was to novel writing, Allen Ginsberg was to poetry. Both were highly influential in their respective spheres. Ginsberg was a young Jewish intellectual, a communist and homosexual, drug user, leftist activist, and radical poet. I believe he also had his share of mental health problems, but don't quote me on that as I'm going by memory. He wrote Howl in 1955, and then all hell broke loose.
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake
At this uneasy point in history, mainstream America was understandably in no mood for artistic experimentation and had banned some books on the grounds that they were obscene. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Lady Chatterly's Lover, a delightful book by D.H. Lawrence, are a few examples. So imagine the reaction of the authorities and the moral busy bodies of the time when this young Jewish guy starts spouting off lyrics about cocks and endless balls. In this poem, Ginsberg fuses and fissions social experiences and have them collide in the rhythms cadences and algorithms of his poetic verses. A literary Renaissance has begun in America, driven from the bottom up. Ginsberg takes his poetry on tour reading it in marijuana haze-filled rooms where buckets of beer and coffee are passed on while he wails and sneers and laughs reading his magnum opus- Howl. The audience- a mix of friends, artists, admirers, and groupies- cheered him on and howled. Jack was there and howled. Neal Cassidy howled too. Go! Go! Go! Literary history made in the American night. What comes out of his enterprise is a cultural nuclear detonation that immediately makes the obscenity leaf-in-the-garden police in San Francisco clamp down on the printed version of the poem and its distributors, who included the mysterious wizard of the beat movement, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, a counter-cultural book store that specialized in publishing underground artistic, and often controversial masterpieces, including Howl.
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
It’s now confession time: I've never read the whole poem. It's just too mad and rambling, and I just don't seem to have the attention span to finish it. A couple of years ago I tried to give it another read and was shocked at some of the obscene imagery used by Ginsberg. I just couldn't finish reading it. Howl is the Finnegan's Wake of poetry. Everyone claims to love it, but not very many people have managed to read and understood the intricate whole. I've read enough to know that the genius of both works consists in subverting the syntactical structures, images, and expectations of the reader to create a holographic and kaleidoscopic experience. At the time when Howl was written, poetry was expected to be of the roses-are-red garden variety, but along came Ginsberg and howled, fuck that!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
In the end, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and company won the day. It was ruled that the material was protected by the constitution and though it may offend you, you have no right to censor it. Simple. FREEDOM OF SPEECH won the day in the good ole USA. This had the secondary effect of knocking down the ban on Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterly's Lover and other works deemed obscene at the time.
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
Ginsberg's poetry and politics may not be your cup of tea. I do hope you agree with me that regardless of how anyone feels about it, Howl has the right to exist and be published freely. This is particularly important nowadays because we are seeing a wave of censorship sweeping the globe. In fact, some of us are here on Hive precisely because of it. What is ironic is that those perpetrating censorship now hold similar political views as Allen Ginsberg, the very man whose howl brought down the shaky structure of censorship laws. Perhaps, they need a reminder that freedom of speech is not just some romantic notion. It is as real as shit. Too much has been sacrificed in the past for us to give up this precious right today.
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
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